Brough's writings on the technology, economic and social issues of communications at the intersection of the Internet, telecom and mobility.

August 27, 2009

The blog has moved

A little over two hours ago, my Communications blog moved to what I hope is it's final home. With the help of Dialogic's web and IT staff, we've got "301 Redirects" established so that traffic that previously went to any of:

When I started consulting to Dialogic on strategy, we established a second set of links to my blog. As a result, both Dialogic-based and NMS-based URLs worked. The problem is, with multiple URLs pointing to each post, incoming links are diluted and search engine rank suffers. The correct solution to multiple historic URLs is to redirect them to the new URL. The http protocol defines "301" for this purpose. A "301 redirect" tells the inquiring user (or search engine) that the post has moved, permanently.

I've known this for some time, but I've been buried in other work (thus the paucity of blog posts!). This past week we finally straightened things out, culminating in this morning's changeover.

To establish a redirect, you have to get DNS to point to a server you control and then install the "301 redirect" on that server. Getting DNS set up was further complicated by the multiple parties involved - that's multiple parties each, for Dialogic and for me. For broughturner.com, the domain registrar is Network Solutions. But I host my personal website at pair.com, so the Network Solutions DNS registry points to DNS name servers at pair.com. Meanwhile my blog is hosted on TypePad, so I established a "custom DNS" record, otherwise know as a CNAME record, on the pair.com name servers so the subdomain, blogs.broughturner.com, points to brough.typepad.com, i.e. to the internal URL of my blog at Typepad.

One final issue: I was aware of how you establish "301 redirects" on an Apache server (via a .htaccess file) but I wasn't aware of how it worked on Microsoft IIS. Luckily, it was easy there as well and, better yet, Dialogic's web team handled it for me. :)

I can see that you are putting a lot of time and effort into your blog and detailed articles! I am deeply in love with every single piece of information you post here. Will be back often to read more updates!